Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy of the Child and Philosophical Thinking for a New Era
Sophia March 1, 2022 DOI: 10.1007/s11841-022-00920-5 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Luce Irigaray's philosophy of the child, presented in her 2017 book To Be Born, reframes the child not as a rights-bearing subject needing care but as a metaphor for a new human being rooted in natural belonging. Building on her earlier work on sexuate difference and the repressed feminine, Irigaray argues that the child within each adult—a source of embodied, affective thinking—has been silenced and repressed. She calls for philosophical thinking to reconnect with these early experiential layers, aligning with methodologies like Claire Petitmengin's microphenomenology and Eugene Gendlin's felt sense. This approach offers a basis for embodied philosophical inquiry for a new era.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Medicine Philosophy |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key finding | Irigaray presents the child as a metaphor for natural belonging and a source of embodied, affective thinking that has been repressed in adults, offering a basis for a methodology of embodied philosophical thinking. |
Abstract
In her book To be Born (2017), Luce Irigaray offers a novel philosophy of the child. Instead of viewing the child as a bearer of rights and in need of adequate care as is common in contemporary philosophies of childhood, Irigaray presents the child as a metaphor of a new human being which represents natural belonging. The rearticulation of the human has been ongoing in Irigaray’s philosophy from its beginnings with its efforts to give voice to the excluded, silenced, repressed feminine. Irigaray’s phenomenological restructuring of subjectivity in her philosophy of sexuate difference is taken to a new level with her philosophy of the child. Her conception of the child is interpreted here in light of the experiential and affective turn within phenomenology and cognitive sciences about philosophical thinking as embodied and embedded thinking for a new era. Irigaray sheds light on the silencing and repressing of the child within us in an effort to enable us as adult beings to think from and with it. Philosophical thinking needs to be more consciously connected with the embodied sources of thought that are already present in early infancy and continue to be present in adult thinking as neglected or repressed experiential and affective layers of thought. Irigaray’s philosophy of the child is a basis for a methodology of embodied philosophical thinking such as has been developed within Claire Petitmengin’s microphenomenology and within Eugene Gendlin’s methodology of philosophical thinking from the felt sense.